Today Sean Plunket interviewed an amazing man called Terrance Wallace on Radio Live .
He is a black American raised by a single mother in Chicago, who has sent up a home for disadvantaged Maori and Pasifika young men that provides them with opportunities they would not have in their own communities.
His initiative is called The In Zone project.
Under his scheme these young guys are achieving great results.
It's a reasonably long though deeply interesting interview (Plunket at his best).
But have a listen to what he says about state welfare at 25:15
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5 comments:
He makes a difference but has no cultural connections as far as race goes so does this mean that race is a red herring? Maybe doing sensible stuff like encouraging children rather than abusing them works across cultures. We don't need a cultural flavour to fix the problem because the problem is not cultural even though it may be over represented in some cultures.
3:16
He can work with who he likes. Interesting though that Maori and Pacific males might identify more with black US males than white when you think about the musical culture they generally embrace. He most probably does share cultural connections beyond race or am I now guilty of stereotyping?
"Maybe doing sensible stuff like encouraging children rather than abusing them works across cultures."
Agree.
I think that your comment about race and music is totally erroneous. There certainly is a connection in popular music but I seriously doubt that that has anything at all to do with race especially.
I grew up as a jazz fan and most of my heroes were black Americans
-at that time in the 1950's it was completely different from popular culture and jazz was a small minority interest.
Yes I think it is stereotyping. People relate to each other in many other ways other than just race.
Frankly the sooner we got over and beyond race the better as far as I can see.
Jigsaw, I wasn't talking about race. Anon raised it. Re music I was thinking more about rap and hip-hop. The 'rhymes' are often about cultural experience of, for instance, parts of black society where fatherlessness,unemployment and the drug trade are the norm. Wallace talks about those sorts of backgrounds being part of the lives of youth he is helping and in that respect (and given his own background) I think there is cultural connectivity.
The point of my blog post was to highlight what he said about welfare - that it is too easy to get and he was quite shcoked when he asked a NZ youth what he was going to do when he left school only to be told that he was planning to go on a benefit when he reached a certain age.
Sorry Lindsay I misunderstood. However I hardly think that rap and hip-hop can be considered 'music' in any way.
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